From Guns to Cranberries

I was not familiar with the Soviet SKS so I looked it up on Wiki. The gun was designed in 1943 and was standard issue in the Soviet bloc militaries for some time. It is classified as a semi automatic carbine, which means it was not designed for fully automatic firing. I am more familiar with the AK-47, which was the first firearm to be called an assault rifle, and can be fired in both the semi and fully automatic mode. The AK-47 should have made the SKS obsolete, but Wiki says that the SKS was issued to Soviet troops extensively long after the AK-47 came on the scene.

The M-14 was America's answer to the AK-47. That's the rifle I carried in my army days. I thought it was a big improvement over the old M-1, but it was soon phased out in favor of the M-16. I hear people referring to the M-15 as the standard assault rifle, and I'm not sure what they are talking about. I remember reading about an AR-15 that came out about the same time as the M-16, but I thought it was a light weight survival weapon that was carried by airplane pilots for use in case they went down and had to walk back home. I'll have to look that one up one of these days, maybe tomorrow.

I am familiar with that thing by Lake 16, although I have not been out that way in decades. First of all, Lake 16 is called that because it is located in Section 16. A section is a square mile of land, containing 640 acres more or less, and they all have numbers. Part of the Lake 16 shoreline is on state land, and part of it is on private land. The private part was bought some decades ago by the Black Forest Peat Moss Company. They had great plans, but ultimately went bankrupt after skimming the best of the peat moss off the top layers. Some time later it was bought by a guy named Hugget, who had experience growing cranberries in Wisconsin. He hired some people and dug the peat moss pits out deeper, selling the low grade moss for whatever he could get. Then he turned the pits into cranberry beds, which was his main reason for buying the place. Last I heard, the cranberry farm was still in business and doing well. My neighbor was their general manager for some years back in the 90s. He got me a job there after the paper mill closed, but I didn't last long. I thought the work was too hard for what it paid, a conclusion that my neighbor eventually came to himself.